Some people are fiercely against the designs, othera are okay with it, another group thinks it looks quite good.

Especially of the first you hear a lot of grief.

Optimus doesn't really look like his original form...at all. He had a more "friendly" and closed off look. But if you want to keep it a bit realistic and do something that translates better into a "real-life" action movie, it's better to make it look more logical and not polished over like in the cartoons.

We wouldn't want Megatron to turn from a giant into a nice compact handgun either, do we?

I'm not very fond of the designs, but hey, you can't have everything. as long as the story has a bit flesh to it and won't be a mindless action plot, I'll be happy

For the longest time i hated the new designs, but if you come from a mechanical background (i work on cars, locomotives and aircrafts...crap)
you can understand that it would be impossible for the forms from the show to actually transform and look the way they do. That is what the modelers had to think about when designing these characters, the only thing i am truly upset about is they could have changed the robot designs, but why couldnt they stick to the original vehichles. That i think would have at least pleased most of us.

_________________Ancient Spirits of Evil, transform this decayed form into Mumm-Ra the Ever Living!

For the longest time i hated the new designs, but if you come from a mechanical background (i work on cars, locomotives and aircrafts...crap)
you can understand that it would be impossible for the forms from the show to actually transform and look the way they do. That is what the modelers had to think about when designing these characters, the only thing i am truly upset about is they could have changed the robot designs, but why couldnt they stick to the original vehichles. That i think would have at least pleased most of us.

They could have stolen a gambit from Terminator 2's playbook and allowed for more fluid transformation. The imposition of hard Newtonian physics has done the Transformers on both sides a severe disservice.